Prosody – A study of rhythm in language and poetry | Sonali Raj

The capital difficulty of verse consists in saying ordinary things the capital difficulty of prose consists in saying extraordinary things; that while with verse, keyed for high moments, the trouble is to manage intervals, with prose the trouble is to manage the high moments.

Verse was traditionally in strict metre, form and often in rhyme as well. Before writing became main-stream, poems were chanted by groups of people and had to be memorised. Formal constraints were very likely a good mnemonic tool – a person trained to listen for iambic pentameter will know something’s missing if he were to forget a foot. Also, when people sing together they find it easier to synchronise their song if it follows a metrical pattern.

Poetry traditions follow metrical patterns that suit their language and context (if, for argument’s sake, free verse be considered a type of metrical pattern (1)). Speech follows rhythmic patterns specified to a great extent by the prosodic tendency of its language. The other influence over linguistic rhythm in poetry and speech, the context, subsumes the constraints of language.

Sound patterns of language (2) result from how vowels, consonants, stress and intonation (3) are arranged in utterance, which in turn is determined to a large degree by syntax. Languages have their own sound patterns because they have different consonants, vowels, tendencies of stress and intonation, and syntactic constraints. Mandarin, for instance, has a more rigid word order than does English, and Sanskrit at the other extreme from Mandarin, has no fixed word order. The word order in English: subject-verb-object is somewhat inflexible because words often lack overt markers that would signify their syntactic category, such as whether they are subjects or objects. (1) ‘Sishupal shot an elephant’, for instance, cannot be written (2) ‘An elephant shot Sishupal’ since there are no visible markers in the accusative case in English. In Sanskrit, on the other hand, words carry the necessary syntactic markers that categorise ‘An elephant’ as the object of the sentence. Hence, in Sanskrit, either word order (1) or (2) could signify that it was Sishupal who did the shooting. This property of Sanskrit and languages like it gives them a lot of flexibility for wordplay and metrical acrobatics.

In this verse from Sishupalvadh (4), written by Magha around 900 BC, for instance, you will notice multiple palindromes:

1 2 3 4 4 3 2 1

1 s? ka r? na na r? ka s?

2 ka y? sa d? d? sa y? ka

3 r? sa h? va va h? sa r?

4 na d? va d? d? va d? na

It means: His army, eager for battle, whose arrows destroyed the varied hosts of his brave enemies, its trumpets vied with the cries of the splendid horses and elephants. (5)

Unlike English and Mandarin, though, Sanskrit is more or less a dead language, (6) and much of what we know about its prosody is an understanding of the stylised metrics in its poetry. The verses of Sanskrit are hard to date with precision. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, Sanskrit literature goes back to c. 1500 BC and continues till a little after 1000 AD. (7) Between 1500 to 200 BC is considered the Vedic period of Sanskrit literature, and around 500 BC to 1000 AD is the Classical period.(8) Classical poetry did not rhyme although it was strictly metered.

Almost all of Sanskrit literature is in verse form, i.e. in metre. Since this was an oral tradition belonging to the educated elite, variable phenomena such as rhythm probably assumed massive importance in its protection, and eventually led to its demise as well. Common folk used to speak a language called Prakrit then and only the Brahmins used Sanskrit, because of which Sanskrit didn’t evolve.

In 1855, while the first struggle of independence from British Rule was fomenting in India and Sanskrit had lost its place in discourse, a poet called Walt Whitman self-published his first book Leaves of Grass in the USA. It waswrittenin the people’s language – free verse, the new language of poetry, which rapidly caught on as a sort of liberator of poetic form.

This was towards the end of imperialism. Many people felt the need for cultural assimilation, just as others reacted more violently to the increased mixing of peoples. In this atmosphere of change, traditional form might have been a less effective rhythm for reflecting the times than free verse was.

Richard Aldington, an Imagist poet and World War I soldier, wrote in his book TheEgoist, published in 1914, that “The old accented verse forced the poet to abandon some of his individuality, most of his accuracy and all his style in order to wedge his emotions into some preconceived and childish formality; free verse permits the poet all his individuality because he creates his cadence instead of copying other people’s, all his accuracy because with his cadence flowing naturally he tends to write naturally and therefore with precision, all his style because style consists in concentration, and exactness which could only be obtained rarely in the old forms.” (9)

Aldington, it is said, “realized that ‘there is a tyranny of novelty as there is a tyranny of antiquity,’ but [believed] that some essential individuality characterizes free verse.” (10)

Free verse might have been the best default form for the Modern Poets but they did use traditional forms as well. (11) Tight patterns prevent a poem from expanding by demanding self reference. Nevertheless, since the early 1900s many metrical forms that didn’t exist in traditional English verse have been adapted to the language to describe contemporary phenomena that sometimes arrived in the English-speaking world bearing their own rhythmic patterns.

By and by, cultural assimilation would lead to the adoption of verse forms from around the world by English language poets and then free verse would be another type of technique, same as a Ghazal, which might be more suited to describe a love story from the Thar Desert of India than free verse would.

Dante da Maiano, a poet and friend of Dante Alighieri, used the preconditioned change in a Petrarchian sonnet’s rhyme scheme from abababa to cdecde to signify the moment when the two lovers in his poem are interrupted in their kissing by the girl’s dead mother (12):

Provedi, saggio, ad esta visione,

e per merce ne trai vera sentenza …..a

Dico: una donna di bella fazone, …..b

di cu’ el meo cor gradir molto s’agenza, …..a

mi fe d’una ghirlanda donagione, …..b

verde, fronzuta, con bella accoglienza: …..a

appresso mi trovai per vestigione …..b

camicia di suo dosso, a mia parvenza. …..a

Allor di tanto, amico, mi francai, …..c

che dolcemente presila abbracciare: …..d

non si acontese, ma ridea la bella. …..e

Cosi, ridendo, molto la baciai: …..c

del piu non dico, che mi fe giurare. …..d

E morta, ch’e mia madre, era con ella. …..e

Susan Stewart writes about this poem that “it would be impossible to render the action of this poem into free verse without giving up a great deal; the braided garland, the twined lovers, the echoing b and ci sounds of kissing (baciare), the toll-like sounding

of bella, bella, bella, into ella, the ghostly triangulation of the third figure and

third sound — all would be lost entirely.” (13)

2. Rhythm, Recursion

“Our speech rhythms are only a small instance of rhythm as a force in nature, indeed a force in the cosmos. Solar pulses, the ebb and flow of tides, those circadian rhythms that affect our sleeping and waking as heliotropic beings are only some of the rhythms to which we are subjected…”

Susan Stewart

Patterns repeat parts of themselves over time and in so doing they acquire meaning. The sound pattern of language, particularly in art, must have some element of repetition so that it does not to seem chaotic; on the other hand, it needn’t have any repetition and though it would be chaotic, it could make sense in a context that intends to imply chaos. The pattern would then have found repetition in that context. In an essay that analyses Hugo Ball’s Lautgedichte, in which words are chosen for their auditory value rather than meaning, the writer Steve McCaffery says that “even if purely phonetic arrangements of sound do not cohere into standard words or avail themselves of conventional grammars, they nonetheless cannot be understood — even as abstract asemantic arrangements of sound — until heard against the background of their cultural and biographical contexts.” The idea is for linguistic rhythm to form loops – to reflect the sound and sense of its words (14) in a context. Emanuel Swedenborg, a philosopher and scientist of the 17th century, said, “Order and the world are in an imperfect state when they do not harmonize; and in such degree imperfect, as they fall short of harmony.” (15) For now, it wouldn’t do to distinguish between linguistic and any other sort of rhythm because rhythm is intrinsic to anything that exists over time, like a pulse.

Sound organised in time gives rise to musical rhythm. In visual art, though the medium is static, its elements – line, tone, colour etc.– are laid out such that a viewer is led across a picture or along a sculpture, (16) which happens over time. Sometimes the artist evocatively captures a moment in time and people, because they understand the direction of natural processes, think of the motion before and after the instant the picture captures.

3. Rhyme

“Rhyme shmyme, I never use the stuff” (18)

People usually agree that rhyme came to English from Arabic poetics. (19) The Arabs were nomadic, and had a strong oral tradition.

Repetition of sound, so as to make a discernible pattern of it, quickens its pace. Repetition makes us concentrate on a realm of sound that doesn’t exist in free verse, and in which we are always thinking of similar sounds that occur before and after the one we are perceiving. (20) Classical Sanskrit literature didn’t rhyme since such a pre-occupation would influence the meaning of poems. Rhyme tends to propel itself and seems outside semantic control. Our tendency to rhyme is like our tendency to tap our foot to the beat of music – it is an inclination to move in synchrony with existing motion. (21)

We instinctively repeat sounds in words like rhyme-shmyme and roly-poly, in which the second term is meant to parody the first in sound. (22)

A pattern in language can have repetitive vowels and consonants that affect the meaning of words. This Sanskrit verse by Magha uses the [bha] and [ra] phones over and over to say,

The fearless elephant, who was like a burden to the earth because of its weight, whose sound was like a kettle-drum, and who was like a dark cloud, attacked the enemy elephant (23):

“Even if a rhyme scheme is anticipated, the unfolding consequences of its manifestation can be full of surprises, particularly surprises of content and perspective.” (24)

In Beijing Spring, a poem by Marilyn Chin, there is a line: Ripples washing sand ripples washing sand ripples… (25) The second ‘ripples’ could be the object of the first ‘washing’ or a subject of the second. It is finally both, which makes the line comprise of two identical loops of motion and an implication of continuity. The vowels are laid out so:

[–I-?-O-I–a–I-?-O-I–a–I-?…]

“A string of words related by sound may make an argument stronger than logic.” (26)

4. Rhythm and Meaning

“Sound must seem an echo to the sense”

Alexander Pope

Poetry stylises the prosodic character of language for effect. In Sound and Sense in the Poetry of Theodor Storm, a study by Alan Galt, which is a statistical analysis of phonological ‘skew’ in Storm’s poetry, comprising about 79,000 consonants and 44,000 vowels, Galt concludes that the phoneme(27)/l/has a positive skew “in love poems and in narratives; strong positive skews in “tender” and “musical” poems. Negative skews in poems of family and home, nostalgia, and humor, with a negative skew for “non-musical” poems which is just below the level of significance.” The phoneme /u/ likewise has a “positive skew in nature poems, political poems, and in ‘musical’ poems. Negative skews in poems of age and death, and in humorous and occasional poems.”

/l/ and /u/ stand for something in Storm’s poetry, but outside of that context they have no meaning. The sound [i] seems to signify smallness even when it occurs in isolation, yet that too is in context of our memory of [a].

In the poem Siesta of a Hungarian Snake:

s sz sz SZ sz SZ sz ZS zs Zs zs zs z

The poet Edwin Morgan has used the semantic, phonemic and orthographic attributes of [s] and [z] so that his poem has the sound and appearance of what it means.

Classical Sanskrit poetry has a form called ‘Mutrika’, meaning ‘to urinate’, in which the resultant lines are undulating to describe how a cow urinates as she walks.

These poems go beyond meaning because they create a vivid experience. In Music and Poetry, an essay in the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, the author John Hollander says that both poetry and music “move to affect a listener in some subrational fashion, just as both are in some way involved in the communication of feeling rather than of knowledge.”(28)

5. Translation

“I…proceeded, not to translate, not even to rewrite, but to

write the poem, exactly the way Charles had done before me.”(29)

Languages have different sounds, even if they do have words with identical meaning, and they cannot have words with identical meaning given that no two people have an identical understanding of the same word even within a language.(30) Translations can capture essence, sound, meaning, but rarely do they capture all of these.

Leevi Lehto, in his essay Prelude: Poetry and Orality, says about translating the first Finnish novelSeitsemän Veljestä (The Seven Brothers), by Aleksis Kivi, where he used all the vowels of the original, “but even this text would not be untranslatable — being, among other things, itself a translation of the work by Kivi and, well, one where I’d finally get at least half of the letters right.”(31)

Even within a language two identical phoneme strings need not have the same meaning: ‘White shoes’ doesn’t get mistaken for ‘Why choose?’(32). Aside from the phonetic quality of letters, prosody is influenced by intonation, by stress and by timing.

“Translators are forced to separate what cannot be separated. Translators are forced to kill the original — and then to try to resurrect, to reproduce, recreate it. It is possible to stay at this stage of separation — not totally, of course, but in terms of emphasis. If emphasis is put on the semantic dimension at the expense of sound and other formal features, we get a trot or the kind of version that Walter Benjamin has dismissed as “inaccurate transmission of an inessential content,” for “what does a literary work ‘say’? ”(33)

6. The Rhythm of English

It is the “drive to preserve rhythm that

induces stress movement.”(34)

Languages have their own characteristic rhythms. In Germanic languages such as English an iambic rhythm predominates: (35)

Mary Pugh was nearly two

when she went out of doors.

she went out standing up she did,

and came back on all fours.

Spike Milligan

English and German have mechanisms to avoid too many stressed syllables adjacent to one another (stress clashes) or long sequences of unstressed syllables (stress lapses).

There is a theory that identifies languages like English and German as ‘stress-timed’ because in these languages stressed syllables seem to occur at regular intervals; in contrast with ‘syllable-timed’ languages like Italian and French, in which syllable onsets are perceived to be evenly timed. English seems to allow for more tonal variation than French does. This classification of languages as stress and syllable -timed was meant to account for a perceived difference in their rhythmic patterns. Listeners claim a rhythmic similarity in American English and Arabic; whereas Jamaican English and American English are perceived to have widely different rhythms. Experimentation has proven that no language displays only one rhythmic character though it is true that one character tends to dominate.(36)

Stress-timing in English is evident in straightforward instances of recitation such as counting. English speakers tend to fall into a rhythm of alternating stressed and unstressed syllables: one two three fourfive six. Another phenomenon is the lengthening of the final syllable in a word or group of words. This happens across languages and helps mark the end of a group of words or sentences in conversation. It is very evident in French, and French speakers tend to count so: un deux trois quatre cinq.

The binary rhythm in English is also evident when monosyllabic words become part of multisyllabic words and their stress pattern changes to maintain a binary rhythm in the long word:

Prop –> Propeller

Cap –> Capacity

In fact, in ‘Propeller’ and ‘Capacity’, the vowel in the initial syllable is reduced so much that it has lost almost all its character and sounds like a blank vowel or schwa [?], pronounced like the ‘u’ in ‘bur’.

A change in the rhythm of a word when it is part of a longer utterance is induced by the movement of stress along the utterance. Usually in English, the last word of a sentence is stressed most followed by the first word, and similarly, in isolated words of two syllables the second syllable is stressed more than the first:

* * Stress line 1

* * * * Base line

Ber-lin Heath-row

However, look what happens when these words are followed by others:

* * Stress line 2

* * * * Stress line 1

* * * * * * * Base line

Ber-lin Wall Heath-row Air-port

The stress that was on ‘lin’ in an isolated ‘Berlin’ shifts to ‘Ber’, as in ‘Berlin’ when ‘Berlin’ is said along with ‘Wall’, as in ‘Berlin Wall’(37):

* * Stress line 2

* * * <— * Stress line 1

* * * * * * Base line

Ber-lin Wall ==> Ber-lin Wall

This occurs to avoid stress clash, which is indicated by two adjacent blue stars in the first column above. When there is a stress clash, i.e. when adjacent syllables bear more stress than the base requirement for utterance, a unit of stress from the left-most syllable moves further leftward, thus creating a cadence in utterance. This is the ‘Rhythm Rule in English’, which “gives the language much of its characteristic metrical flavour.”(38) Graphically, this rule can be described as:

* * Stress 2

* * * <— * Stress 1

* * * ==> * * * Baseline

Rhythm Rule in English

When the language is used, though, there are various situations in which the Rhythm Rule is not applied.

English speakers often say Berlin, rather than Berlin as the Rule would have predicted. This is because the word ‘Berlin’ is said along with ‘Wall’ so often that it retains the accent it would have had in the compound ‘Berlin Wall’, even when it is said in isolation. We therefore hear:

* * Stress line 1

* * * * Base line

Ber-lin and Heathrow

In English, stress can only move leftward in a metrical grid. This constraint sometimes prevents stress clashes from being resolved.

Consider: There has been a taxincrease.

There is a stress clash here that the constraint in direction of stress movement prevents from being resolved. This sort of limitation doesn’t exist in all languages. In German, for instance, stress can move rightward as well so that the stress clash in taxincrease would have been resolved by: ‘taxincrease’ becoming ‘tax increase’.

Similarly,

Aufstehen —> früh aufstehen

(wake up) (wake up early)

In the example above the stress from ‘auf’ shifts rightward so that the syllable ‘steh’ is stressed when the word appears after a stressed syllable.

Yet another situation in which stress clashes aren’t resolved is when there is a more practical difficulty in the shifting of stress. Consider the compound ‘antique dealer’ and the phrase ‘antique chair’(39):

Compound Phrase

* * Stress line 2

* * * * Stress line 1

* * * * * * * Base line

antique dealer antique chair

In the phrase ‘antique chair’, there is no clash in stress; whereas in the compound ‘antiquedealer’ there is stress clash which can’t be resolved because of the following impossible situation:

Compound

* Stress line 2

*<– * Stress line 1

* * * * Base line

antique dealer

The orange stress column above can only be represented on paper; it can’t be said, and is therefore impossible.

Similar to why ‘Ber’ in ‘Berlin Wall’ is stressed, rather than ‘lin’, even the phrase ‘antique dealer’, referring to a dealer who is old, will likely be stressed the same as the compound that refers to a person who deals in antiques (antique dealer) because of the greater frequency with which we use the compound.

While the Rhythm Rule is fundamental to English, the requirement for an iambic rhythm in the language must make way for parameters such as the need to denote emphasis or grammatical category.

Deviations from the Rhythm Rule regularly occur based on the grammatical category of words i.e. whether they are verbs or nouns; and on word collocation or whether a group of words constitutes a compound or a phrase.

By and large, the right-most syllable of a verb tends to be more stressed than the left-most; while the opposite is true for nouns:

An implant; to implant

The refuse; to refuse

The increase; to increase

And similarly, the last word in a phrase tends to be more stressed than the first; while the first word of a compound is more stressed than the last. While speaking, though, we pay most attention to emphasis and meaning in the context of what we’re saying. Consider, for example, the following sentences(40):

I swatted two time-flies

I swat time flies, not time ants

Time flies, space doesn’t

Time flies, don’t kill them

Because the meanings of ‘time flies’ cannot be known without being interpreted in context, there is no reason to suppose a necessary connection between stress and meaning when the same words are used in isolation from their context.

That being so, a study that compared rhythmic processing by the brain in language and music discovered that when the penultimate syllable of a word in a French sentence is stressed, rather than the ultimate syllable, which is what normally happens, the listener often finds it hard to understand the word, and cannot integrate it into the context of the sentence. In other words, an unnatural distortion in the rhythm of a language hinders comprehension. The study also proved, although perhaps superfluously, that training in music helps people “recognize distortion in the lowest frequency… in language as well.”(41)

The trained ear of a writer is attuned to the rhythmic patterns of his language, and to possibilities of other rhythmic patterns – such as those of foreign linguistic cultures, and especially those used in music because it is a medium rich in metre, and listening to music (if not playing it,) helps sensitise the ear to patterns of sound and determine when a sound pattern seems complete; incomplete; how elements of surprise or mundanity are introduced and so forth. The poet Hart Crane, it is said, used to listen to the same song over and over. Repeating anything helps the mind memorise it – a method that should work for memorising rhythmic patterns as well.

7. The Use of Rhythm

“Meaning arises from the patterns of sound that are not consciously heard: the pauses and spaces that make speech audible; the phatic back-channel fillers and voiced pauses that punctuate messages (all the ums and ahs and uh-huhs); and those audible units, from rhyme to syllable to breath phrase, that can organize otherwise undifferentiated flows of speech sound. For all of these writers, sound is never either inherently noise or message; instead, sound and sense are located at the intersection of social bodies in particular spaces.”(42)

To study the rhythm of language we need to have units that we can place along a timescale to observe patterns.

There are long units such as stanzas, phrases and sentences, and we divide words into smaller units of sound – feet and syllables, vowels and consonants – so that we may talk about exercising rhythmic control even at the sub-lexical level. This way the parts of words that are stressed can be considered independently of those that aren’t.

A syllable is a unit of sound smaller than a foot, (which can and usually does have more than one syllable). A foot requires a full vowel (broadly speaking, a vowel that is stressed); while a syllable just requires one vowel. We start from the rightmost extreme of a word and moving leftward we divide it into syllables and then group the syllables into feet. The word ‘un-told’, for instance, has two syllables and one foot; and ‘ut-ter-ly’ has three syllables and one foot.

The classical feet in English poetry are:

Bisyllabic:

Iamb – Unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. It is also called right-headed.

Trochee – Stressed syllable followed by unstressed syllable; also called left-headed.

Spondee – Two stressed syllables.

Trisyllabic:

Anapest – Two unstressed syllables followed by one that is stressed.

Dactyl – One stressed syllable followed by two that are unstressed.

These feet in sequence form meter. So, iambic pentameter has five iambic feet and ten syllables. Anapestic tetrameter likewise contains four anapestic feet and 12 syllables.

Sanskrit verse too is measured in feet (gana [g??]) composed of syllables that end in long or short vowels. The vowels ‘a’, ‘i’, ‘u’, ‘ri’, ‘lu’ are short. The first three of these become long when they are followed by two consonants. The feet in Sanskrit verse are(43):

Sanskrit Feet

Syllabic/Vowel Description (U=short vowel; _ = long vowel)

Greek Names

Ma [m?g??]

_ _ _

Molussus

Ya [y?g??]

u_ _

Bacchius

Ra [r?g??]

_ u _

Creticus

Sa [s?g??]

uu _

Anapaestus

Ta [t?g??]

_ _ u

Antibacchius

Ja [j?g??]

u _ u

Amphibrachys

Bha [bh?g??]

_ uu

Dactylus

Na [n?g??]

uuu

Tribachys

A long syllable is called guru, and a short syllable is laghu, denoted by ga [g?] and la [l?], respectively.

Therefore,

Gagam [g?g??]

_ _

Spondaeus

Lalam [l?l??]

uu

Pyrrhichius

Galam [g?l??]

_u

Trochaeus

Lagam [l?g??]

u_

Iambus

A line of Sanskrit verse is called pada [p?d] or charana [char??] and usually two to four lines form a shloka [shlok], which is sometimes translated as ‘formula’. Similar to English and most languages, the last syllable of a line and of a shloka is long. This doesn’t mean that only spondee, iambs etc. are used at the end of a line because the last syllable could be free standing; and free standing syllables (those that aren’t part of a foot,) aren’t constrained to the ends of lines or shlokas alone.

Poetry is a highly stylized way of using language. Other than by controlling rhythm at the sub-lexical level, the rhythm of the phrase and stanza can be manipulated by line breaks and punctuation, by phrasing sentences inventively, and by using the space of the page to lay out text in ways that affect its rhythm.

Two techniques commonly used for controlling rhythm at the level of phrases and stanzas in poetry are end-stopping and enjambment. An end-stopped line has a pause indicated by a comma, semi colon or full stop after it. While reading, the line would be perceived as terminating at its end; as opposed to a line that doesn’t have a pause at its end and is therefore perceived to ‘lead on’ further down. This sort of line is said to be enjambed. Enjambment gives a feeling of forward movement; while an end-stopped line gives a “momentary sense of completion, a release from tension.”

This is illustrated in the following five lines of a poem called We Real Cool by Gwendolyn Brooks(44):

Enjambed:

We real cool. We

Left school. We

Lurk late. We

Strike straight

End-stopped (Modified from the original):

We real cool

We left school

We lurk late

We strike straight

The first column is more interesting than the second – it not only urges us to read further; it emphasizes the phrases ‘real cool’, ‘left school’, ‘lurk late’ rather than the ‘We’, ‘We’ that is emphasised in the second rendering, making the poem quite bland.

The poet must understand the metrics of his language, and he must know prosodic traditions, but“create a new rhythm – as the expression of new moods – and not…copy old rhythm, which merely echo old moods,”(45) in the words of Ezra Pound.

Thus, Charles Reznikoff, for whom the term ‘Objectivist Poet’ was coined, wrote:

Trees standing far off in winter

Against a polished blue sky

With boughs blown about like brown hair;

The stiff lines of the twigs

Blurred by the April buds;

Or branches crowded with leaves

And a wind turning

Their dark green light

And changed it seven years later to:

April

The stiff lines of the twigs

Blurred by buds

*

[1] “Given the power of rhyme schemes of all kinds to lend particular semantic and visual weight to the place of unrhymed words, we might see the development of free verse as an unrhymed pause in the greater scheme of rhyme’s poetic history.” Susan Stewart, Rhyme and Freedom, The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound, Ed. Marjorie Perloff & Craig Dworkin, University of Chicago Press, 2009

[2] The term ‘language’ by default refers to speech in this Essay, and it does not exclude poetry recitations.

[3] Intonation is the pitch pattern of a sentence: Peter Ladefoged, A Course in Phonetics, Thomson Learning, 2001

[6] Sanskrit is not in common knowledge spoken anymore, other than in Mattur village in Central Karnataka, South India, where the language is a medium of communication and where there are said to be native Sanskrit speakers.

[7] It might be of interest to place the vast body of Sanskrit Buddhist texts in this context. Gautam Buddha is supposed to have lived around 500 BC. He was a prince of the Magadha Empire in North-East India in the present day state of Bihar. (John Keay, India: A History, Harper Perennial, 2004)His was a Hindu family that very likely followed Vedic traditions, which the prince saw were inadequate in alleviating suffering and loss. His ideas, therefore, were a protest against Vedic culture. Another school of thought that originated out of protest against the oppressive Vedic tradition was that of the Charvakas. This was a cult of non-believers or Nastiks (Gr: Gnostic) who believed that life is full of suffering, and who propagated hedonism.

[8] There are varying opinions with regards to all ancient Indian dates – the Buddhists use the birth of their leader as a reference point for the dates they mention, similar to how we use the Birth of Christ as reference when we mention dates. Since nobody knows when the Buddha was born, all the dates associated with his birth are ambiguous. With that in mind, it is necessary to picture a rough chronology in order to speak of specific linguistic movements. The literature of the Classical period (500 BC to 1000 AD), for instance, did not rhyme although it was strictly metered.

[11] Modern Poetry started at the turn of the 19th century, with Robert Frost and continued into Elizabeth Bishop’s career around the 1970s. Free verse was a popular technique but Modern poets like W.H. Auden and Hart Crane wrote extensively in metre (Langdon Hammer, Modern Poetry, Yale Open Courses, http://oyc.yale.edu/english/modern-poetry/content/class-sessions)

[12] This poem, A Diversi Rimatori, by da Maianowas published in DanteAlighieri’s Rime. It was meant to be coterie poetry. The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound, Ed. Marjorie Perloff & Craig Dworkin, University of Chicago Press, 2009

[14] “It is a loop that allows a system to ‘perceive itself,’ to become ‘self-aware.’ By virtue of having a loop, a formal system acquires a self. The key to consciousness is not the stuff out of which brains are made, but the patterns that can come to exist inside the stuff of a brain. Brains are media that support patterns that mirror the world, of which, needless to say, those brains are themselves denizens— and it is in the inevitable self-mirroring that arises that the strange loops of consciousness start to swirl. In other words, An “I” comes about via a kind of vortex, whereby patterns in a brain mirror the brain’s mirroring of the world and eventually mirror themselves, whereupon the vortex of “I” becomes a real, causal entity. The more self-referentially rich such a loop is, the more conscious is the self to which it gives rise.” Douglas Hofstadter; Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Loop, Penguin, 2000

(This sort of rhyme, in words like ‘mishmash’ and ‘hum-drum’, is called “close rhyme” in English and “Schlagreim” in German. In Morphology this method of word formation is called Reduplication and it is done predominantly to alter the meaning of an existing word (Wikipedia:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduplication).

[21] In A Course in Phonetics, Peter Ladefoged has this to say about synchronised motion: “Stress can always be correlated with something a speaker does rather than with some particular acoustic attribute of the sounds. Consequently…the best way to decide whether a syllable is stressed is to try and tap out the beat as a word is said. This is because it is always easier to produce one increase in muscular activity – a tap – exactly in time with an existing increase in activity.[21]”

Repetitive stress patterns and rhyme (rhyme being one method of repeating stress), are the substance of patterns, as will be elaborated later in this essay.

[22] (This sort of rhyme, in words like ‘mishmash’ and ‘hum-drum’, is called “close rhyme” in English and “Schlagreim” in German. Susan Stewart, Rhyme and Freedom, The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound, Ed. Marjorie Perloff & Craig Dworkin, University of Chicago Press, 2009

[29] Leevi Lehto about translating Charles Bernstein’s “Besotted Desquamation,” a poem of twenty-seven sections, in which the words of each section share the same initial letter. From: Leevi Lehto, In the Beginning Was Translation, The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound, Ed. Marjorie Perloff & Craig Dworkin, University of Chicago Press, 2009

[30] “The external aspects of a poem are interpersonal. They are transmissible to practically anyone who speaks and reads the language in which a given poem is composed. The internal aspects are personal. They are in the mind of the reader-listener; essentially nontransmissible from one person to another; they are always in movement within memory: movement of images, of thoughts. Ultimately, the external written form is idle, but not the internal mental page that constitutes the wRitten form.” Jacques Roubaud, Prelude: Poetry and Orality, Translated by Jean-Jacques Poucel, The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound, Ed. Marjorie Perloff & Craig Dworkin, University of Chicago Press, 2009

[31] Leevi Lehto, In the Beginning Was Translation, The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound, Ed. Marjorie Perloff & Craig Dworkin, University of Chicago Press, 2009

Ezra Pound here is talking about the intentions of the Imagist poets. He went on to add that “We do not insist upon “free verse” as the only method of writing poetry. We fight for it as a principle of liberty. We believe that the individuality of a poet may often be better expressed in free verse than in conventional form. In poetry, a new cadence means a new idea.” Pound wasn’t referring to all poets’ intentions, though it would probably have pleased him if all poets had had these intentions.

Indian Review | Literature and Criticism | Author

Sonaii Raj is a writer living near New Delhi. Until recently Sonali was working as a journalist at the Economist magazine. Now Sonali is a full time writer.